Magazine

Q&A: Director Sarah Goodes

It's not giving anything away to say there’s a love-triangle aspect to The Children. Can you tell us the set-up?

Well, they're in a very small cottage in England, somewhere on the east coast. It's not a place you would normally live. It's a place where you'd holiday or it might have been a fisherman's cottage. There’s been a natural disaster that has damaged a nuclear reactor, so Robin and Hazel have had to move to this cottage because their family home was inside the exclusion zone. Their four children are grown up, living away.

Both Robin and Hazel worked at the nuclear reactor as nuclear scientists with the third character, Rose, but they haven't seen Rose for 20 years. The play starts with Rose appearing at their door all of a sudden.

Hazel knows that Rose and Robin were involved with each other before she and Robin had their first child. So, there’s this palpable tension about why Rose has shown up after all this time.

What was your first impression of the play? What do you feel playwright Lucy Kirkwood is trying to get across with this story?

The first thing that hit me when I read the script was how such a seemingly small, detailed play could tap into such large themes and ideas, like intergenerational responsibility, and how we live our lives in our current times.

The story also has a loose correlation to the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan and the tsunami that happened there. I remember being deeply affected by that and watching quite a few documentaries about the overwhelming impact on the community, on people’s personal lives and the collective trauma it created.

I think Kirkwood is also interested in how we can live with less. We live in a society that is built on growth and accumulation. So, there’s a question in the play about how we could be richer with less rather than more – what that means culturally and philosophically.

Kirkwood’s previous play Chimerica, which we saw here at STC in 2017, was this huge, expansive, globe-trotting thriller. On the other hand, The Children is a very intimate chamber piece of three characters in a cottage. Her subject matter is just as ambitious but she's pared the scale right back. Why do you think that is?

You could argue that she's applying the idea of living with less to her own playwriting. I think it's interesting that after writing such a global epic like Chimerica, she gave herself the challenge of how to explore epic themes in a very small, contained space.

She creates this wonderful tension by giving the characters nowhere to go. She closes the doors, she keeps it all happening in real-time. As a playwright, she’s really flexing her muscles to go from the epic to this very detailed playing space. Only an incredibly brave and talented playwright would give themself that challenge. And that’s what she is.

Are you keeping the play set in England?

Yes, from research, I realised that Kirkwood might have loosely based the location on the village of Dunwich in Suffolk. There's a nuclear reactor not far from there and, in the 13th century, it was this big, very important port that was almost entirely destroyed by several terrible storm surges. There's a reference in the play to hearing the sound of church bells from under the ocean where the church fell in.

I’m working with STC’s Resident Designer Elizabeth Gadsby and one of the things we've been talking about is the importance of the ocean in this work. In interviews with people who experienced the Fukushima tsunami, all of them use this incredible language of the experience of the Tsunami being unfathomable, overwhelming and incomprehensible. They can’t quite describe the enormity of this thing; the children who are interviewed talk about it being just as they had imagined a monster. In the play, Hazel talks in great detail about the moment of the tsunami coming. In both Japan and in the play, there’s a sense of this eerie peeling back of the ocean, and a stillness, before this rush of it coming forward as this unstoppable, primal force. With Elizabeth, I’ve talked a lot about how we might have the ocean present in the design – the pulse of the ocean. And how that pulse, that breathing of the ocean, comes together with the characters by the end of the play.